Quotation

Instinctively he knows my central weakness: inability to avoid filling an awkward silence with jabber. === “The key, Boston Blackie. You’ve broken into your last crime scene.” === So I told him about the balloon payment. “Is that all?” he said. “I thought maybe you had a lump in your testicle.” === But the visitor on my doorstep is a stranger, a smallish man in an orange-and-silver jogging suit with chestnut hair falling over one eye, lending him the illusion of youth. === ‘Friend’ is an easy word to throw around; it should have ten syllables, to prove you’re prepared to work at it. === It’s a job to them. It’s like a surgeon referring to a patient, a fellow human being, as ‘my gallbladder. === If I told you half the ways a private conversation can be overheard, you’d dump all your gadgets and communicate by tin cans.